In case you didn't get the memo, life is unfair!

Hello again eveyone. There has been a lot of heated discussion of over my last few posts about education in Singapore and I'd like to do a quick summary today to deal with some of the main issues that has been flagged up in the comments section. Obviously, this is a controversial topic and I'm writing as an older professional who has had many years of working and I have played the role as the gatekeeper in various companies before. So clearly, the way I view the issues raised would be from that point of view, as opposed to say a student who has yet to complete their degree or even that of a parent who is currently trying to help their child through the education process. These aren't quotes, rather I am just trying to summarize the complaints (and strip out the personal insults - let's be civil, I'm after a respectable discussion with adults, I'm not looking for a fight.) But first, here's a memo for all of you before we begin: life is unfair, incredibly so.

"Those who miss the cut-off for NUS are not stupid, they are victims of the fact that there's no middle ground between NUS and a private university which offers a distance learning programme. We're talking about students with maybe Bs and Cs, not the kind who failed every subject. If they had rich parents, they probably could have been sent to a decent university abroad but in Singapore, they have little choice but to go to SIM if they don't want to retake their A levels. It is unfair of you to condemn such students as stupid or incapable, as if they are the scum of the earth. As a gatekeeper, you need to look carefully into each case, rather than automatically condemn anyone who ends up in a private university. You could overlook a potentially great candidate." 

Yes there are far fewer options for those who do fall through the gaps with mediocre grades, with the wrong mix of Bs, Cs and Ds, you probably wouldn't make the cut for the more popular courses at NUS. And of course, there's a difference between someone who missed the cut by a little as opposed to someone who missed by a mile. I always point out that there is the option to resit one's A levels if you really feel that the grades you obtained simply do not reflect your true ability - but that's a gamble of course, there's no guarantee that you may get better grades even if you do try again. Thus if you're a mediocre, average student with Bs, Cs and Ds and you cannot get into the course of your choice at NUS/NTU/SMU, then you still do have quite a few options before applying to SIM. Apart from hitting the reset button by retaking your A levels, you can also simply settle for a course that may not be your first choice but would still enable you to study at somewhere like NUS, bearing in mind that you often do not use what you have studied at university in your job - it is just really getting a degree for the sake of proving you're worthy of being a graduate from a reputable university. Be flexible with your career plans and take plenty of other courses outside your university to improve yourself. The world will be a very different place in a few years and just accept that it is nearly impossible to study everything you need at university to prepare yourself for the working world. Heck, you'll probably forget most of the stuff you study anyway.

The other option which many people don't think about is to go down a far more niche path and gain specialist training in technical areas which will lead to a qualification that may not be a degree, but it will turn you into an expert in your field. Many people shun this path because their parents expect them to get a degree - but what is the point of a degree at the end of the day? Should it be just a stepping stone to help you get a good job, which is the ultimate goal? But if you can achieve that ultimate goal via an alternative path, then why would you need that degree anyway? Do you really need a degree for it? Take something like Cryptocurrency for example - it is hard to read the financial section of any newspaper without hearing something about Cryptocurrency and clearly, the people who pioneered this technology didn't learn about it at university. Whilst many universities are rushing to include Cryptocurrency in their syllabus now or even offering degrees in Blockchain, given how fast this whole area is progressing, it is clear that anything you study in university as a freshman is probably going to be obsolete by the time you graduate and start looking for a job - so you're no better off than someone with a totally irrelevant degree but is very willing to apply himself and learn about this kind of technology.

Of course, for a young person to decide that they want to go down a route like that, they need to have been given the freedom to explore many of the different options out there and have had enough time to develop their various interests outside school in areas that have little to do with their A level subjects. The problem with a lot of Singaporean parents is that they feel that any kind of hobbies as such is a waste of time that will only get in the way of their children achieving those straight As they need to get into a good university, so the parents are the one stopping their children from developing any serious interests beyond their studies. But if you only have plan A (ie. get straight As, go to a good university), your world will fall apart if it doesn't work out. But if I were to tell your typical Singaporean parent to let their children learn about Cryptocurrencies, their typical reply would be, "if it's not in the syllabus, if it's not needed for the exam, it can wait. Ah boy/girl is already struggling so much at school, aiyoh, liddat where got time to learn about things like Blockchain and Bitcoin lah?" The very people who need plan B the most are prevented by their parents from even developing the concept of a plan B - oh the irony! Having good parents who understand this concept would make so much difference, bad parents can well and truly screw their kids up - luck of the draw, you get the parents you're given.

 "Not all the people who end up at the top universities are the smartest - quite a few of them are rich kids who parents have given them an unfair advantage. They get everything they need from private tuition, specialist help and even the domestic situation is different - they have maids to ensure that they don't ever need to even wash a teacup and so they can dedicate all their time to studying. Kids from poorer families don't have access to all that expensive, specialist help in the form of private tuition and often have difficult domestic situations, like they will almost certainly have to help with the housework, take care of young siblings or grandparents or even work part time to help pay the bills. The rich kids get driven to school each morning whilst the poor kids have to wake up early to get the bus or MRT - so that means they get more sleep the night before. Surely just looking at results or the ranking of the university does not give you a full picture or the context behind each candidate's story." 

Whilst that is totally true, some universities do make provisions for borderline cases - there are cases whereby teachers can write a strong letter of support for a student who has come from a very difficult background, but let's be clear about this: the university will accept the student if it is a near miss, after taking into consideration the student's background. But if the student has missed by a very long way, then there's no way any amount of justification can make up that difference. The onus is then on the gatekeeper to look at the bigger picture, beyond the grades - to see if the candidate has developed skills in other areas like teamwork, leadership, sports, volunteer/charity work and other areas outside the curriculum. But of course, if the student has got to rush home each day after school to take care of a very sick grandparent, then that poor student simply doesn't have the opportunity to say pursue sports, music, drama or even have much of a social life outside school - so having been deprived of those opportunities, his CV isn't going to shine like that rich kid who has had all the time in the world to do everything from tennis to Japanese language lessons to violin to drama classes. When I put it that way, of course it is definitely unfair! Yeah, on paper, it is very hard to create a CV as brilliant as your average rich kid if you're poor and just didn't have those opportunities, but wait there is a silver lining.

Imagine if I have the scenario where I am down to two candidates, both equally capable on paper but one candidate is a rich kid from a super wealthy family, whilst the other one is working class kid from a poor family - I can't speak on behalf of all gatekeepers, but in such a situation, the working class kid would definitely have an advantage. The logic would be that if this kid can achieved so much with the odds having been stacked against him all his life, think of how much more he can achieve if we give him the right kind of training and guidance when he is working in our team. We would see him as the unfinished product, a rough diamond with a lot of potential just waiting to be tapped. However, the rich kid may be charming and have all the fine manners you would expect of someone from that kind of privileged background, but there is no reason for us to treat him like a rough diamond - no, what you see is what you get. There is some risk involved of course in taking on rough diamonds, there's no guarantee you are the right people to polish this diamond but nonetheless, us gatekeepers are human and yes, we can show compassion sometimes - we do recognize and acknowledge that people like that have far more potential in them. But we need you to get pretty far in the process before we can say, "I'd go with the rough diamond instead of the rich kid - it is a risk we should take." We do like and admire people who have achieved a lot despite being given very little. Mind you, that's me speaking as a rough diamond myself.

"The A levels in other countries like the UK are easier than in Singapore - rich kids get an unfair advantage because they get to take the easier route by doing their A levels in the UK whilst poor kids like me are stuck in Singapore doing the harder Singaporean version. So these rich kids have a far better chance of getting into a good university than their poorer Singaporean counterparts. It's not fair - the odds are stacked against us." 

As one of my regular readers Choaniki has pointed out, the Singaporean O levels and A levels system has been delinked with the British system way back in 2006 and 2002 respectively. He has also pointed out that the UK system does suffer from grade inflation, which is also true. But what you seem to assume is that the people working at the admissions department are idiots - that's where the whole argument of 'an easier route' falls apart. Here's how admissions are handled in the UCAS system here in the UK, each candidate gets an offer upon application - it could be unconditional or conditional, like "score AAB and you have secured your place." So if the UK system is really easier, then the university would ask the British student for AAA whilst asking the Singaporean student for AAB or ABB. It is not like there's a one size fits all approach when it comes to admissions since universities receive applicants from all over the world from America to China to Italy to Namibia including from countries where they use a completely different system which isn't directly comparable or compatible with the British A levels system. Therefore every application will be treated as a unique case and judged on its own merits, taking into account the different kind of local system of the country of each student.

"Yeah but I know of rich Singaporean students who really sucked at their studies, like really stupid one. Then their rich parents transferred them to a posh English private boarding school in the UK, then suddenly miracle happen can get into Oxford - the system is so unfair because those rich students are clearly stupid one." 

Once again, I would caution against anecdotal evidence. The one thing the UK is very good at is education - if you're rich, you can buy a much better quality of education at one of the private schools where you have everything from the best teachers, much smaller classroom sizes, the best labs and IT facilities to country club style premises. Now if you were to compare that to your average JC in Singapore, it is a world away - even though Raffles Institution is very nice, it's still a world away from these schools in the UK which charge up to £34,300. There are quite a number of super-elite schools in the UK (Tonbridge School, Eton, Westminster, Malborough etc) which charge those kinds of fees and you get what you pay for. Their students are very rich but not necessarily that smart - these schools have a challenging task of getting their students into top university and the formula they follow isn't rocket science: they are very good at identifying which subjects the students are good at and more importantly, which subjects the students suck at. You only need three A level subjects at the end of the day and often in Singapore, little thought goes into the process. For example, it is just assumed that all students must do some kind of maths as that would be useful regardless whether or not the student has any aptitude for it. In Singapore, either the kids or their parents choose their subjects and they are allowed to pursue it.

There could be a lot of reasons why a student doesn't do well in their studies in Singapore and stupidity is just one of many possible reasons: few people are so intelligent they can excel in all subjects equally, most of us find some subjects easy whilst we struggle with others and that's completely normal. It isn't that uncommon to find yourself in a situation whereby you take a subject only to regret it later when you find you just don't like it or that it is a lot harder than it is. I say it is far better to cut your losses at that stage and switch subjects rather than struggle on for two years only to end up with poor results for it at the A level exams. Hence when a rich Singaporean transfers to a posh UK school, they're effectively hitting the reset button and the teachers there can then pick the lowest hanging fruit - the most suitable three subjects for that student that is mostly like to deliver the best possible results. After all, these schools realize that it is more important to get the straight As then to pick a 'useful subject' - the straight As will get you into a good university, a C or D in something like economics or maths is only going to be a nasty stain on your record. Yet so many dumb parents believe that studying those subjects will give you "useful knowledge"! So don't hate the player, hate the game: if you haven't played the game well enough, then you only have yourself to blame for not having understood the rules in the first place.

The only one easy goal I can see in this scheme is Chinese as an A level subject - the standard here is shockingly easy, like the A level exam here for Chinese is the equivalent of the PSLE standard in Singapore. Yeah, so even if you sucked in Chinese by Singaporean standards, you can get an A here in the UK with your eyes closed. The reason is that they had tried to introduce Chinese as a subject into the UK years ago but the uptake was low because most people feared that Chinese was going to be way too difficult and that it would be impossible to score an A for it at the exams. So as a result, they lowered the difficulty of the exam to the point till at least some of the British students could score an A, so really, that's the one and only subject where Singaporean students who transfer to the UK system will have a distinct advantage with - that's just one A you can get with very little effort if you are from Singapore. But as for the rest of the subjects, that's just a question of picking the right combination to produce the best possible results - when I put it like that, it seems pretty obvious really. The rich people are not just paying for better teachers, but teachers who truly understand how to work the system to the advantage of their students. Hence, don't hate the player, hate the game.

"I am more in the camp that with the right mentors, one can cultivate the appropriate attitudes towards life. The course content is like a "playground" for one to train the student. But the student must realize that the course content is just a "playground", and that employers are more concerned about what else can the student bring to the company. Because if it is just only the course content, the employer might as well, employ the teacher, who is much more well-versed in the content, compared to the student. And the fact that teacher is not being employed by the employer, speaks a lot more about the situation."

OMFG, this comment so totally hits the nail on the head. I think there is a lot of immaturity amongst the students. I remember once witnessing a mother and her daughter at a food court, I think the girl was about 8 years old or so and she was trying to tell her mother every minute detail of what happened that day in school. I could tell that the mother was getting really bored but trying not to show it. I think she must have tuned out at some stage because the daughter took out some drawing that she made in school that day, the mother asked, "oh that's nice, what is that drawing for?" And the daughter got angry, "Mummy! I already told you what it was for!" Yeah, that daughter expects her mother to give a shit about everything she did in school because she had put in a lot of effort to be a good student, but please don't expect us gatekeepers to have the patience of that doting mother. I did cover this in my last post when I made it clear that even though some of the private universities may have made big improvements to their course content and structure, at the end of the day, it isn't the course content that we're that fussed about as employers - we're looking at the bigger picture.

And well, why not employ the teachers then? Well the simple answer is that we're looking for people with a certain kind of skills to fill the roles at our companies and the teachers have the right kind of skills to teach, but not to do the jobs that we're recruiting for. The fact is the university cannot predict what kind of jobs their students may do in the future, or what kind of products or services they need to deal with - so all they can do is to teach them how to learn. So the course content is the perfect playground: you get presented with a difficult concept, you're expected to first learn how it works, demonstrate that you know how to apply it in real life and then possibility conduct experiments or studies to show that you truly understand it and know how to use it in real life. Loads of university courses also expect you to do independent research and that will vary depending on the kind of course you do. But if you make it through all that at university and get a decent grade, then the message I get as a gatekeeper is "okay, you are a fast learner, you can grasp complex concepts within a reasonably tight time frame and I can train you". That's all, really. And as for the teachers, well, you have to ask them why they are not applying for jobs that pay a lot more than their teaching positions - but I suspect the obvious answer is that they just don't have the right kind of skills get those jobs, that's why they have settled for teaching.

"Aren't you being really harsh, even unfair when it comes to judging young people who have made a mistake in not having studied hard enough to get the right grades to go to a good university? Weren't we all young, immature and silly as teenagers? We're not the same people in our 20s when we enter the workforce, yet you are focusing on that one period much earlier in their lives. Judge them as the adults they are today, not the teenagers they were 10  years ago. How far back are you going to go - will you look at their PSLE results?"

I beg to differ. I don't believe we were all young and dumb at 16-17. I have seen 9 year olds with a stunning degree of maturity and I've seen 25 year olds acting like dumb kids. Whether you end up with a good or bad attitude really depends on your upbringing: the way were nurtured in your younger days - your parents will be the main determinant of that, but otherwise you have teachers, coaches, other uncles & aunties along the way as well as older siblings/cousin who will set the mould for your young mind. Growing up, acquiring a good attitude is not something automatic like the onset of puberty, no the emotional process is quite complex and that's why we have a range of different kinds of attitudes out there - some good, some bad but not all the same. Now can someone who is immature at 16 or 17 years old grow up and attain a better attitude by the time they reach employment age in their 20s? Yes, that is entirely possible. But I'm not just looking for faults - I'm also looking for candidates who have had the (unfair) advantage of a really good upbringing, so they already have the right kind of professional attitude for work. If you have had really good parents who didn't neglect you, then you wouldn't have been left to make silly mistakes the way "young and dumb" kids do when they are left to their own devices. The responsible parents would just wade in and say, "no you're not doing that, don't be stupid"

I spent most of my spare time in the gym training as a child, this is a sport for teenagers and children, rather than adults. I'm sure many of you have heard about how Nadia Comaneci won 4 gold medals, 1 silver and 1 bronze at the 1976 Olympics but how many of you knew that she was barely 14 when she achieved that incredible feat? Nadia's journey to become the world's most famous legend in gymnastics began long before 1976, she started gymnastics at 6 and from that tender age, was expected to work harder than most adult athletes. We're talking about a sport where most female gymnasts peak in their mid to late teens and most retire before they reach 20, this is quite unlike say tennis, swimming or basketball where the women can continue competing way into their 30s. Subjecting young gymnasts to such a harsh training regime is not without controversy of course and many parents choose not to subject their children to that kind of brutal training methods. But since I grew up in that kind of environment, I am hardly going to be tolerant of 16 or 17 year old teenagers for being "young and dumb" when I have seen gymnasts as young as 8 or 9 exhibit such discipline that would put most adults to shame. After all, the competition for good jobs is so tough out there, gatekeepers are not going to suffer fools gladly when there are so many brilliant candidates out there who didn't suck when they were teenagers.

Young people these days have access to so many incredible opportunities - the internet has really allowed them to explore so many areas of knowledge, they are no longer limited by what their schools are teaching them as they explore the world wide web. Allow me to share with you the incredible story of Tanmay Bakshi, whom at 14 became an AI expert for IBM. There was no course in the world that could have taught him now to become such an expert - it was all self-taught. Whilst his peers were barely toilet trained, Bakshi was teaching himself how to code at the age of 5 and by 7, he was already teaching others how to code through his Youtube channel. Bakshi dropped out of school when he soon realized that he was a lot cleverer than his teachers - he is now working with the best experts in AI at IBM. Yes, whilst I do recognize that people like Bakshi and Nadia are extremely rare and I certainly, even I pale in comparison when I consider what I had achieved by the age of 14 compared to them - but the fact is teenagers today can and do achieve extraordinary things that put most adults to shame. Whilst I certainly don't expect your average candidate to have won an Olympic gold medal by 14 years old, to go to the other extreme and allow them to be totally 'young and dumb' whilst being teenagers is actually being rather condescending to them! I certainly wasn't young and dumb when I was a teenager (I was a scholar and a gymnast on the national team by the age of 16) and neither are a lot of my readers.

"Shouldn't you allow children and teenagers to have a childhood rather than expect them to start winning Olympic gold medals or starting their own companies whilst in their mid-teens? Like they haven't even finished their secondary school yet - like can't you just back off and let them be just ordinary teenagers who are just students? Yes we can judge adults if they have not done anything by the time they are in their 30s, but teenagers are not the same. Some teenagers have parents who will guide them and help them achieve a lot, but what about those who are not so fortunate? How the hell are we suppose to compete? It isn't fair at all, is it?" 

Well of course it is unfair! The best advantage anyone can have in life is to have good parents who do care and want to nurture their children well. The teenagers who have gone on and done incredible things by the time they were 14 or 15, guess what? They probably had quite a lot of help along the way - Nadia didn't teach herself gymnastics, no her coaches at the Romanian national training center did. Then you have the case of Laura Dekker - the youngest person to have sailed solo around the world, she did that at the age of 16. Did this desire to achieve something like that come out of the blue? No, her parents were avid sailing enthusiasts and she was born in New Zealand during a 7-year sailing trip around the world by her parents and she spent the first 5 years of her life at sea. You could almost say that sailing is in her blood and it would have been surprising if she completely turned her back on sailing as she grew up. Then there's American actress Tori Spelling who is best known for her role as Donna on Beverley Hills 90210 which was produced by her father, Aaron Spelling. But that wasn't her first role - no, her dad put her in loads of other shows as a child actor. Yeah, talk about nepotism. And as for those of us who don't have parents who were able to even point us in the right direction when we were young, gosh we then hope that we can encounter teachers at school who will care about us enough to help us.

Are these young people who managed to get a lot of help during their childhood at a massive advantage over their peers who have more ordinary parents? Definitely. Is it fair? Of course not, but then again, life just isn't fair. But let's take a step back and look at it from the gatekeeper's perspective: if we get a candidate who has had the benefit of a great upbringing and has had loads of advantages thanks to their rich and influential parents, then they are still the superior candidate regardless of how they obtained those privileges. But where do we go from here? You can either say, "life sucks, the world is so unfair, I hate the system, I hate everybody, I will never succeed" and just give up. Now that's a bad attitude! Or you can say, "okay, I had a bad start but I'm willing to make up for it - tell me what I have to do and I will do it." Us gatekeepers, we're human - some of us have also come from very humble backgrounds and poor families too. I remember how a director in one of the companies I worked for said something about meeting Margaret Thatcher as a boy when his father was at Buckingham Palace receiving his OBE award. Contrast that to my upbringing in Ang Mo Kio, where do I even begin? I want to see hunger in the candidate, that willingness to do whatever it takes to get ahead, that eagerness to learn - that's the difference between a good attitude and a bad attitude. Just watch the video below please and I'll let Les Brown explain this to you, his story truly brings this principle to life. For Les Brown, it all started with meeting a kind teacher who cared about him. He must have had many teachers over the years but only one actually cared about him and that's all it took - one can assume that his other teachers were shit! Please watch the video below.

I could go on, but I think it would be nice to end on such a positive note with Les Brown. What about you then - how do you feel about any of the topics we have covered here? Feel free to leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.